It's not trivial, because making fun metagames is hard, because game design is hard, and blockchain is not a shortcut to it.
> I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties
This is backwards. A game about battling kitties must start with kitty battling gameplay that is fun. This is like discussing the programing language -- who cares? Tell me how your game is fun.
Blockchain won't help you at all there. Nothing about it makes anything "fun".
You are proving the other commenter's point: blockchain is not a special sauce for games. Whether a game is enjoyable or not has nothing to do with blockchain. In fact, it turns to be the opposite: if blockchain is involved, you can almost bet there's very little gameplay at all, because that's not what the developers care about.
It's fun to take something someone else built, and do something new and not planned by the origional devs with it. That's it, it's just not necessary to assume bad faith.
It's not bad faith. It's reality. It's also spotting logical and technological holes the size of Jupiter in any of the proposals from clueless[1] crypto maximalists.
[1] Many of them are not clueless, just grifters
It's like Dunning-Kruger, except the bar for "doesn't know enough to know he doesn't know enough" is right at the ceiling
MOST games I've seen don't provide a public API for players to interact with, and even when players do reverse engineer them, they get accused of cheating, hacking, whatever, and often get their accounts banned.
In the world of blockchain gaming, it's trivial to build tools and meta-games around anything, and there's basically nothing that the original developers can do to stop it. I can host a small bit of static HTML that gives users the ability to battle cryptokitties with each other, and capture each other's kitties. Then at the end of the day, the winner can go back to the main cryptokitties site, and breed their new kitties like normal. I don't need to ask anyone's permission, and all I need is a stable place to land some HTML, and maybe deploy some contracts depending on the level of integrations I want to build. I don't need to apply for an API key, or start up an email conversation with anyone at Dapper Labs. I can just build it, and anyone with a web3 capable browser can play along.
This is the magic of "permissionless" systems, and it's the standard across the blockchain gaming ecosystem.